Steelers vs. Saints in Paris: The First-Ever NFL Regular-Season Game in France

On Sunday, October 25, 2026, the New Orleans Saints host the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. It sounds like a routine Week 7 matchup. It isn’t. For the first time in the league’s 100-plus-year history, an NFL regular-season game will be played on French soil — the ninth country to do so, and arguably the biggest football-culture market the NFL had never touched.

Here’s everything to know about the game, why the NFL chose Paris, and where it fits in the league’s decade-long international expansion. (For kickoff times all season long, see the full 2026 schedule.)

American viewers can catch the game live on NFL Network, with kickoff set for 9:30 a.m. Eastern — a rare morning broadcast window that puts the game in prime European afternoon time. In France, every NFL game streams live on NFL Game Pass on DAZN, with free-to-air coverage of weekly games on M6 and additional season-long coverage on beIN SPORTS. (No French broadcaster has been announced for this specific game; Game Pass is the confirmed way to watch it live.)

The Paris game isn’t a one-off experiment. It’s the centerpiece of the most ambitious international schedule the NFL has ever released. The 2026 season features a record nine international games across four continents, seven countries and eight stadiums — with three brand-new host cities: Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro and Paris.

The NFL has been building toward this systematically. Flag football — an Olympic sport beginning at the 2028 Los Angeles Games — has grown rapidly in France, with league-backed flag football initiatives there now engaging thousands of young athletes, per the Saints’ ownership. The Stade de France gives the league a venue with real pedigree: built in 1998, it’s France’s largest stadium and the home of the French national soccer and rugby teams.

French Sports Minister Marina Ferrari framed the game in exactly those terms in the official announcement: “Hosting the National Football League’s first regular-season game in France marks a historic milestone and serves as a powerful symbol of our country’s international sporting influence.”

The NFL formally announced the matchup, date and venue on May 13, 2026. Two details stand out for anyone following the league’s international playbook:

The Saints are the designated home team. Like all international games, this is technically a neutral-site contest — and the schedule-makers gave New Orleans the home flag, meaning the Steelers travel as the road team. (One quirk worth knowing: some schedule listings show this as a “home” game for both clubs, a display artifact of neutral-site marketing. The official designation is Saints home, Steelers away.)

Louisiana’s French connection is doing quiet work here. Saints owner Gayle Benson tied the game directly to that heritage in the announcement: “Louisiana’s relationship with France is centuries deep, and this game represents another meaningful step in strengthening those cultural and economic ties.” Of all 32 franchises, the Saints are the most natural ambassador for an NFL France debut.

Tickets went on sale through Ticketmaster France, with hospitality packages available via On Location, the NFL’s official hospitality provider, per the team’s announcement.

To understand what Paris means, it helps to know the road that got here:

• 1983 — First NFL game in Europe: a preseason matchup at Wembley Stadium in London.
• 2005 — First regular-season game outside the United States: the Cardinals beat the 49ers 31-14 before 103,467 fans at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City.
• 2007 — The NFL International Series begins at Wembley (Giants 13, Dolphins 10), starting the London program that now hosts multiple games per season.
• 2022 — Germany joins with its first regular-season game, in Munich.
• 2025 — Dublin hosts its first NFL regular-season game.
• 2026 — A record nine games, and France becomes the ninth country to host one.

Through the end of the 2025 season, the NFL had played 62 regular-season games abroad, in London, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dublin, São Paulo, Mexico City and Toronto. France was the notable absence on that list. The remaining 2026 slate still includes Madrid (Bengals-Falcons at the Bernabéu, Nov. 8), Munich (Patriots-Lions, Nov. 15) and Mexico City (Vikings-49ers, Nov. 22).

Three things, and they’re not all PR.

The NFL is done testing Europe — it’s operating there. Nine games in one season, across new continents, with permanent partnerships (GL events, local federations, city governments in the Saint-Denis announcement) is operations, not experiment. A league that once flew in for a single London game each October is now running a season-long international circuit.

Paris completes the map’s biggest gap. France is one of Europe’s largest sports markets and a 2024 Olympic host with proven appetite for global events — yet it had hosted zero NFL games while smaller markets like Dublin and São Paulo got theirs. The Stade de France announcement closes that gap in a single stroke.

For the Saints and Steelers, the stakes differ. New Orleans gets a “home” game with worldwide visibility and a cultural hook no other franchise can claim. Pittsburgh — and its famously traveling fanbase — gets a road game in a market the league wants to win over. As Steelers president Art Rooney II put it in the announcement: “Playing the New Orleans Saints in such a historic setting is a great opportunity to showcase the NFL’s global growth and to connect with fans around the world.”

Whether the France debut becomes an annual fixture like London remains to be seen. But on October 25, the NFL’s map of “home markets” officially stops at nine countries — and starts including one where they play the other kind of football.